Tracing Rays Reflected from a Spherical Mirror

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This Demonstration shows the rays from a point object (blue dot) striking a spherical mirror. The incoming rays are shown in blue and the reflected rays in green. The image point, as calculated in the paraxial approximation, is shown as a green dot. The two gray dots mark the center of the sphere and its focal point. The rays are calculated without the paraxial approximation; spherical aberrations for wide mirrors can be clearly seen.

Contributed by: Jonathan Weinstein (September 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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